This. This is what we need. These are the kind of steps from which we all benefit. Google has just announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge: the company promises not to sue any users, distributors, or developers of open source products based on the patents it owns (unless first attacked).

but they seem to have almost zero impact on anything real in the tech industry

This can seem only to those who really have zero idea about the industry. To pick one example out of many - Jolla is hesitant to enter US market (initially) precisely because of the patent mess or "minefield" in their language. So here you have it - idiotic patentability on software and design affects the industry, i.e. US users not being able to get Jolla devices with warranty after the launch (but only through gray market).

And don't say that you don't know about the problem of patent trolling, because if you don't - what are you doing trying to claim that patents have zero impact on the industry?

Its all moot anyway, Apple is gonna ram through DRM into the HTML spec and MPEG-LA is gonna patent troll the living hell out of anybody that doesn't pay their license fees. MPEG-LA has so many patents there pretty much isn't any way other than bandwidth sucking raw video or MPEG-1 (Which IIRC recently fell out of patents) to do squat on the web with video without violating MPEG-LA patents and as Moz found out they don't play well with others.

Nice gesture Google but unless you are willing to buy out MPEG-LA I have a feeling within 3 years its gonna be a 2 way race, 3 way if Google uses the TiVo trick to lock down Android, otherwise it'll be Apple on the high end and MSFT scraping by on the scraps.